NoViolet Bulawayo's "We Need New Names": A Novel of Hope and Heartache

travisburne: What a rollercoaster this book was and sent me on. I didn’t live her life but she brought my memories back to me of a different time in my youth.

United Kingdom on Jun 02, 2023

catsholiday: This is written from the point of view of a young child in Zimbabwe. She and her friends play imaginative games and steal guavas from a neighboring wealthy area.

Meanwhile, the country is in political chaos. The children are aware but don't really understand what is going on.

Darling is taken to live in the USA with her aunt. Things are strange but once again she adapts and makes friends.

It is well written and very emotive. You realise what horrors some people have to live through and what they will do to try and escape one horror only to find things are not that easy in their new home.

It also makes you question some charities work in third world countries and how patronizing some of it is!!

I don't know what the answer is but whatever we are doing isn't working !!

United Kingdom on Mar 20, 2023

Piro: I'm giving this 4 stars not because it is not an excellent book but because it fell a little short of the hype. Maybe if I'd read it without expectations, I might have rated it just that little bit more.

The book is in two parts. The first part is set in Zimbabwe around the time of the troubles with white farmers after independence. The second part happens in the US after the child narrator has emigrated to the US on a visitor visa.

NoViolet's writing has the unique ability to seem mundane at first and then suddenly hitting you with an incident of such profundity that you are forced to pause, reflect, re-read, and pause again for reflection. This is perhaps the ingredient that makes interesting what would have otherwise been a routine story of poverty driving emigration from a deteriorating postcolonial country to the West.

This book has won many prizes and laurels-understandably so. A recommended read.

United States on Mar 04, 2023

Readsalot: The author writes from the perspective of a young girl, displaced in an African nation undergoing revolution, oppression, and psuedo-liberation. Franz Fanon told us years ago that the oppressed become the oppressors, and the author brought this home brutally. In addition, we are provided with painful insight into the emotional price of diaspora paid by a young woman in the U.S. While powerful, the writing is confusing, and the reader has to guess context time after time. A stream of consciousness style of story telling left me dissatisfied.

United States on Jan 25, 2023

Ameya: This is an unconventionally written book - seemingly on the surface about a kid's world, yet hitting hard in places while seemingly maintaining an irreverence about the extremely prickly issues it speaks about. We’re transported to life in a shanty-town from the view of a young girl and her friends, and how a life which is agonizingly unfair and difficult for an outsider, is looked at by those for whom have to live it themselves, for those for which this is ‘normal’. It’s not a unique narrative style I’m sure, but an incredibly powerful one, one which allows the author to shock and cause us to count our blessings, without ever seeming like sermonising. The protagonist in the second half moves half-way around the world to the United States, to become part of that world of immigrants which then helps us look at the First World from the view of the Third World, and the pains of the immigrant’s journey. Again, not unique – but NoViolet Bulawayo’s style, her characters and her observations make it seem very fresh.

This is also one of those books where the moments stay with you longer than the story. Stealing the shoes of a girl who’s just hung herself, watching...

India on Jun 18, 2016

Oparazzo: "We Need New Names" ist die Geschichte kleinen Simbabwerin Darling, die in einem Slum namens Paradise in der Nähe der südafrikanischen Grenze aufwächst, und die plötzlich all ihre Hoffnungen erfüllt sieht, als ihre Tante sie zu sich in die USA holt.

Mit dieser Zäsur in Darlings Leben zerfällt auch der Roman in zwei Teile. Zu Beginn sehen wir sie mit ihren Kameraden durch die Gegend streunen, Guaven klauen und anderen Unfug treiben, und mit Kinderaugen auf ein Land blicken, das von Korruption und Gewalt zugrunde gerichtet wurde. Nichts funktioniert, Armut, Alkohol, AIDS und Gewalt prägen den Alltag, und die Kinder sind mehr oder weniger sich selbst überlassen: Die Schule ist zu, weil die Lehrer über die Grenze abgehauen sind, so wie die meisten der Väter auch, und die Mütter haben Wichtigeres zu tun als sich mit ihrem Nachwuchs zu beschäftigen.

Und dann ist Darling plötzlich in ihrem Gelobten Land, blickt durchs Fenster auf das trostlose, tiefkalte Detroit, und nichts ist so, wie sie es sich erträumt hatte. Jetzt hat sie zwar genug zu essen, aber sie muss erfahren, dass Immigranten, die sich in legalen Grauzonen durchschlagen müssen, kein einfaches...

Germany on Sep 14, 2014

Patty Akriel: It is one of the gem storytelling experiences to arise from a Zimbabwe on the verge of great change, having undergone tumultuous changes since independence.
The write’s mastery in storytelling shines through as she uses the “eyes” and childhood experiences of the main character “Darling” to illustrate life during the elections where for the first time the word CHANGE was banded. The suffering of the Zimbabwean people through poverty, hunger, no education, no freedom of speech – simple basic deprivation of human rights is lightly narrated through the main character’s childlike voice.
Darling’s childlike explanation of the redistribution of land in Zimbabwe after independence is craftily narrated through the following excerpt "If you're stealing something its better if its small and hideable or something you can eat quickly + be done with, like guavas....so I don't know what the white people were trying to do in the 1st place, stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country" begins to reveal a mature comprehension of the colonial evils and long term effects.
Every child character reveals different effects the autocratic Mugabe regime had on families. The...

United States on Sep 09, 2013

Friederike Knabe: NoViolet Bulawayo's debut novel, WE NEED NEW NAMES, is the story of Darling, a young Zimbabwean girl living in a shantytown called 'Paradise'. She is feisty ten-year old, an astute observer of her surroundings and the people in her life. Bulawayo structures her novel more like a series of linked stories, written in episodic chapters, told loosely chronologically than in one integrated whole. In fact, the short story "Hitting Budapest", that became in some form an important chapter in this 'novel', won the prestigious 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.

In addition to Darling, the stories introduce her gang of close friends. They are vividly and realistically drawn and we can easily imagine them as they roam free in their neighbourhood and also secretly walk into 'Budapest', a near-by district of the well-off... One of their goals is to get a glimpse how the other side lives, but primarily to find food and anything useful to trade. They enjoy climbing over walls, peek into gardens and houses, and heave themselves into trees to get their fill of guava, a fruit that can temporarily lull their constant feeling of hunger... but with unpleasant consequences.

Darling's...

Canada on Aug 15, 2013

Bonnie Brody: NoViolet Bulawayo has written a novel that sings. Its sentences are like poems and the characterization is visceral and ever-present. Taking place in Zimbabwe, the book's beginning is about a group of children with unusual names - Darling, Chipo, Bastard, Bornfree, Forgiveness and Messenger, to name a few. Narrated by 10 year old Darling, we learn of their lives in Paradise, a tin house shanty that is where they ended up after a revolution that took away their family's homes, jobs, and way of life. "We didn't always live in this tin, though. Before, we had a home and everything and we were happy. It was a real house made of bricks, with a kitchen, sitting room, and two bedrooms." Darling's father has gone to South Africa to find work but they never hear from him and he sends no money home. "Because Father does not do anything for us, Mother complains. About our tinned house, Paradise, the food that is not there, the clothes she wants, and everything else."

Schools are no longer in service as the teachers have all left to go and live somewhere else in Africa where they will get paid. Chipo is pregnant by her grandfather and the children want to try and end her pregnancy....

United States on Jun 08, 2013